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fastbeef

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Regarding salaries, pick a number you’re a tony bit ashamed to say out loud and add 5-10%. Use that as a starting point and let them talk you down. You’ll probably want to try this out a few times on jobs you’re meh about to get comfortable saying it.

I went through this exact situation. I wound up telling them like it was - I liked everything about the job except my actual duties. Then I proceeded to describe to them what I’d like to do instead (focus on ops) and basically invented a position for myself. And they said yes!

My point is, don’t dwell On What you don’t want, but rather focus on what you do want and work to make it happen.

I’m in the process of starting up a side business for my wife, making and selling physical goods. I’m in Sweden, and the go-to here is Klarna. They have their issues, but integration with WooCommerce was a breeze and people have come to expect Klarna as the default way to pay online.

I stumbled upon this when trying to get started with my master thesis. In frustration, I threw a bunch of buzzwords and random thoughts at LaTeX and then stashed it for a day or two. After that, I picked it up, looked at it critically and went "well, this paragraph is obviously wrong, here's what it SHOULD say..." and two hours later I had a very rough draft finished.

It’s not a software system, but rather me figuring out and abstracting away stuff like payroll, taxes, bookkeeping, client acquisition, insurances , pensions and everything else that makes developers’ palms sweaty when they think about going freelance.

Right now this doesn’t eat up all too much of my time so all is done in Excel basically. But if we’re, say, 10 devs I’d reconsider building something.

Where I’m located (northern EU) consultant is a fancy word for contractor. However, due to the shortage of people I can charge 95€/hour where the fully loaded cost for an employee is around 30-40€/hour.

We’re all run-of-the-mill .Net developers, but we all have a niece (mine is finance and pension funds).

I don’t know if I’ve “made it”, but two years ago I started a small consultancy which increased my per-hour billing to almost triple compared to when I was an employee doing the same thing. I use this extra cash flow to work 25-30 hour weeks.

Recently, I started to offer this setup “as a platform” to previous co-workers taking a 20% cut of their billing. If I get to five I can stop working all together.